In tandem with today’s launch of Apple Music, the company has also pushed out an update to its GarageBand ($5) music creation software, with a tie-in that allows artists to now publish their tracks directly to the Apple Music Connect service, allowing jams and mixes in progress to be quickly shared with fans.

For casual Instagram users, the web site and mobile apps are probably more than sufficient, but if you’re heavily into the social photo service, Menu Bar Labs’ Diapositive ($4) provides an OS X app for getting at your Instagram feed. Designed exclusively for OS X Yosemite, this app provides a stream-like browsing experience similar to Twitter clients we’ve seen, with tabs at the top that let you access your own feed, Instagram’s most popular posts, posts you’ve liked, profiles, and a search for users and tags. The feed itself is elegantly simple, with photos front and center, descriptions and tags, and easily accessible buttons for liking and commenting on posts.

Apple introduced the next version of OS X today during its Worldwide Developers Conference. Dubbed OS X El Capitan, the update focuses on a number of user interface improvements, including iOS-like swipe gestures in the Mail app, pinned tabs in Safari, the ability to mute other tabs in Safari to deal with background audio, enhancements to Spotlight search that add more contextual information to searches, and a new natural language search in Spotlight, Mail, and Finder, allowing users to find information with searches such as “documents I worked on last June.” Several improvements have also been made to mission control and the windowing interface, allowing for full-screen enhancements to apps like Mail, and split-screen side-by-side window presentations for improved multitasking. Metal has also been added to the Mac version, providing significant graphics improvements and better battery life.

Long an iLounge favorite for iOS, Frogmind’s Badland: Game of the Year Edition ($10) finally arrived on Mac last week. Originally released in 2013, the physics-based side-scroller has been updated with above full-HD visuals and totally reconfigured controls for the Mac.

We were pretty impressed with IK Multimedia’s iRig Pads MIDI Groove Controller when it arrived last year, and the company has now taken its offering up a notch with its iRig Pads Editor (free), a Mac application that lets users much more easily customize the MIDI controller for their own personal creative process.

While advanced photo editing tools such as Photoshop can certainly allow you to do things like apply blurs in order to hide private information, or “redact” images, it’s definitely overkill if that’s all you want to do on a regular basis. And of course, not everybody even keeps these kinds of “pro” tools on their Mac. Fortunately, if all you’re looking to do is redact documents or screenshots, however, Nothing Magical’s Redacted ($5) offers an inexpensive and quick solution. Simply drag-and-drop the image you want to work within into Redacted and drag boxes over the sections you want to hide. You can even choose from three different redacting styles — pixellate, blur, or a simple black bar.

While Apple’s Photos app is a handy way to organize your photos, its options for converting and updating metadata are limited at best, so in these cases you’re better off simply exporting your photos and passing them through a third-party app more specifically geared toward the task. Enter Overmacs’ Reformator ($12), an app expressly designed for bulk image operations, including converting into popular formats, assigning meaningful names, watermarking with text and images, making adjustments, and more.

Now that Apple has released its Photos app for OS X, it’s probably a good time to deal with cleaning up your library before migrating it over and moving it to iCloud Photo Library — especially since you’ll need to pay Apple for space to upload your photos to iCloud, and if you have duplicates in your library, those definitely will count. If you’ve already made the plunge and migrated your library over to the new Photos app, you’ve probably noticed that Apple has done nothing to deal with avoiding duplicates, and of course if you’re trying to consolidate photos from more than one place to get them all into a single Photos library, the process can get even more confusing. Fortunately, Overmacs has you covered with PhotoSweeper 2.1 ($10), an update to our favorite photo duplicate management app release, made to specifically add support for the new Photos app.

With Apple basically having turned its back on continuing to develop its “pro” photo management app, Aperture, serious Mac photographers are essentially left with Adobe’s Lightroom as the only real game in town. Many photographers already preferred Lightroom to Aperture, if for no other reason than the fact that Adobe kept up a pretty brisk update cycle that seems to have fallen into a stride of one major upgrade per year. This spring brings Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC ($10/month), an update that preserves all of the features, UI, and workflow that Lightroom fans have come to love, with some great new added features such as Face Detection, HDR image support, panorama creation, video slideshows, HTML5 web galleries, and more.

Although recent iPhone cameras have gotten significantly better at low-light photography, it’s still inevitable that some graininess or “noise” will mar the surface of your photos when shooting in less ideal lighting conditions. Professional tools like Lightroom offer some capability of dealing with this, but running everything through Lightroom or Photoshop may be too much for the casual photographer to deal with. Fortunately, Macphun’s Noiseless ($18), provides a much simpler, lower-cost alternative. Designed with simplicity in mind, Noiseless provides a “one-button” solution for removing digital noise from photos while keeping the detail and color intact.

Apple has announced updates to Final Cut Pro X ($300), Motion ($50), and Compressor ($50) — Final Cut Pro 10.2, Motion 5.2, and Compressor 4.2 respectively. Final Cut Pro 10.2 adds new 3D titles, improved masking, and native support for more camera formats to Apple’s professional video editing software. The complimentary Motion 5.2 adds more 3D title options, and Compressor 4.2 can create an iTunes Store Package, which can be quickly submitted to an iTunes Delivery Partner in order to sell a movie on the iTunes Store.

While the Calendar app that Apple includes with OS X Yosemite is pretty good for casual, everyday users, it may sometimes fall short for those who rely on their calendar to manage their busier lives. Fortunately, there are alternatives, including Flexibits’ new Fantastical 2 ($40), a major update to the company’s calendar app that takes it beyond its menu bar origins and brings it to life as a full-fledged standalone calendar replacement. Fans of the original Fantastical need not fear, however, as the menu bar option remains in place for quickly viewing your calendar from anywhere and adding appointments, but it’s back and better than before with the ability to detach it from the menu bar as a mini-calendar window that can be placed anywhere on your screen, and allow you to scroll through an infinite list of your appointments.

While there are no shortage of options for office productivity apps among Mac users, ranging from Apple’s own iWork suite to more cloud-based solutions like Google Docs, it’s pretty hard to argue that Microsoft’s Office suite remains the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to features and compatibility for exchanging documents with others. Even though Microsoft tends to lag a bit behind in their Mac versions, they provide reasonably good support for the Mac platform, making it easier for users to work on files from their own computers, or even to use their Macs at work. With Microsoft’s Office 2016 for Mac Preview (free), the company is basically giving away preview versions of its latest Office apps, a bundle that now adds Microsoft OneNote alongside updated options of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

BusyMac’s BusyCal has long been a great option for many users who have found the standard Calendar app in OS X a bit too basic for their needs, and now BusyMac has brought the same sort of advanced features to your address book with BusyContacts ($50), a powerful replacement for the standard Contacts app on OS X. Designed to be a full-featured contact manager, BusyContacts integrates seamlessly with BusyCal and Apple’s Mail app, providing a flexible CRM solution. Features include customizable views to allow you to view contact information in a variety of different ways, along with an activity view that gives you a display of appointments, tasks, and even recent e-mail conversations, messages, and social media posts associated with your contacts.

On the heels of last year’s successful release of Affinity Designer, Serif is back at it again with a public beta of Affinity Photo (free*), which promises to be a new affordable app that may give Photoshop a run for its money. Described as “unashamedly pro even as a beta version,” Affinity Photo is packed with higher-end features that creative professionals need and love, including end-to-end CMYK, LAB color, editing at 16-bits per channel, ICC color profiling, Frequency Separation editing, live blend modes, full support for Adobe Photoshop PSD files and 64-bit plug-ins, and more.